Wednesday, May 12, 2010

What now, Until Cataclysm Cometh?

The lull before an expansion is the time many guilds fall apart.
The additional hurdle of the summer blues looms as well.
What then shall this Death Goddess be doing between now and Cat?

1. My lovely ladies
'Hine' is a term meaning 'woman' in several polynesian (Pacific) cultures.
Their pantheon of goddesses often but not always starts with the prefix Hine-
In searching for an appropriate name for my nascent DK, I had a long list of death and/or night gods/goddesses, and my final 10 had only two females. However, with the very important Choosing Talent, my spouse favored Hinenuitepo, and my Death Knight was born! Hence all of my toons 'born' in the LK era have been female deities, and a fun naming system it has been!

Hinemanu has been my very-slowly leveled Hunter, and she's now reached 50! Eww, female dorfs.... :)
She may or may not see 80 prior to Cataclysm, and that's fine with me. I'm enjoying the extremely casual leveling I do on her, and playing (as I've said before) the one class I said I'd never play. I've still done very little research or theorycrafting on How to Play Huntards, but I find I do just fine, thank you, as I am.

Hinetitama is currently languishing as my 'second' toon - primarily my healer - who rarely gets to play since I'm severely limiting my time in Wow and my DK is rolling both 10 and 25 man raids. Still, she has the Once Bitten achieve that Hinenuitepo lacks, and when a healer is needed for a guild run of VOA or the raid weekly or some such, out of mothballs she comes! Sometimes I feel like leveling Alchemy just to make my pots/flasks on her, since I rarely mine these days. She's herb/mining, and I almost always make my money in the AH, so farming for mats seems a waste of time.

I have several Hine-names on standby just waiting to join in the fun.
New alts? Perhaps.
Name/sex changes for existing alts? Maybe. Except for Hiro. He gets to stay the 'original' main character and will forever be my human rogue.

2. In which achievements .... suck?
Speaking of achieves, grrrrrr.
I mean, /cheer for my guildies.
I posted about forming a raid and unfortunately my 10-man raid remains unformed. I still pug 2-5 players every night, and even some of the guildies who've popped in and out of my group are somewhat less polished than most.
Hence, you can probably understand my ambivalence when BOTH the other two guild 10-mans popped up with the Glory of the Raider achievement within minutes of each other on Monday and proudly paraded their shiny new mounts around Dalaran. I'm proud of them, and I feel good for them, but I feel distinctly unsupported in my attempts to get a third group going. This could be an entirely separate blog post, but I'll cap this segment with the 'news.' My group, given its inconsistency, can't find a groove. We haven't killed Lich King since the first time, and have only managed a couple of heroic boss kills. Given that for my 'core,' 10-man regular loot is completely worthless, we've become a labor-filled farming run for alts and non-guild pugs. I've had several of my best players 'poached' by one of the other groups (including an alt-heavy Friday night run organized by the more successful Mon/Tues groups), and typically see the best new guildies gobbled up before I have a chance at them. I do feel like giving up on the group and either not raiding 10-mans, or just trying to slide into the occasional 'main' groups. That feels unfair and unfaithful to the 3-5 guildies who've stuck with me so far, so I haven't done that yet. :(
I did have a good laugh on our 25-man night after we'd made about 5 heroic Putricide attempts (lovely mess of a fight, that) when we decided to do the Nausea, Heartburn, Indigestion achievement on normal difficulty and we messily accomplished the task despite oozes sprinting all over the room.

3. Shadowmourne Cometh Before Cataclysm!
We had the shared joy of watching Massakur carefully present his 50 shards to Mograine and in return our first (and Alliance server first as well) Shadowmourne. Mass is well-deserving and it does feel to me like a true guild accomplishment.

In addition, my 5 month old decision to leave my more-casual but wonderful guild has been vindicated, and more-than-vindicated. Not only has my still-not-quite hardcore guild killed Arthas (which is where my old guild and 20,000 other guilds are stuck), we've progressed to 8/12 heroic Icecrown. ANND, my belief that I was surrendering the dream of a Shadowmourne of my own has been resurrected! I put in the personal effort to craft Shadow's Edge, complete all the quests, received the support from Insomnia for the raid quests, and was the de facto - and default - next in line for the legendary! Thus, I was humbled and thankful to receive my first Shard en route to 49 more and a shiny never-before-obtained orange. :P If all goes well, in approximately 6-8 weeks I'll have the privilege of holding a nice new axe.

4. The rich get richer.
I already posted on my Cataclysm prep plans, but this summer another goal I have is to save gold and mats as much as possible to be ready for the next expansion. It'll keep me busy :) As my main, Hinenuitepo is fairly well set up with everything she 'needs,' but if it looks like heirloom items will work at 80+ (I doubt it), I'll fill out my set. If any rep or anything else is needed, I'll grind that out too.

The pre-expansion blues may slow even my fervor (as it does for so many people) - that and the incredibly busy summer I have before me - but I plan to hang around and enjoy many of the fun times to be had in Wow between now and then.

About Hinenuitepo

Hinenuitepo is a female Orc Death Knight in the guild Casual Corps on the Frostwolf server in the MMO World of Warcraft. This blog centers around her adventures and those of her fellow Death Knights in fighting the scions of darkness and defeating pixellated monsters.
The author works for the world's most powerful military as a real life healer.